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Scientists Determine Structure of 1918 Flu Virus

Posted by timothy on from the reconstruction-junction dept.

Elusive_Cure writes "NIMR scientists have solved an 85-year old riddle by determining the structure of the flu virus which jumped from birds to humans in 1918 killing more than 20 million people worldwide. This is the same virus that took more lives than World War I and became the largest and deadliest influenza outbreak in recorded history."

32 comments

  1. Last Post! by Undefined+Parameter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just kidding. This is a really cool thing, and particularly relevent today because of the sudden expanse in outbreaks of bird flu around the world, today. When such a disease can suddenly and unexpectedly start killing and incapacitating humans in frightening numbers, it's a cause to celebrate when even a small part of that disease is newly known and understood. I took my flu shot, last year, and got sick from it. This year, I may take it again, just in case Hitchcock was a wee bit off in his depiction of the dangers posed by our avian friends. ;-) ~UP

    --
    Eat the Path.
    1. Re:Last Post! by Directrix1 · · Score: 4, Informative

      You can't get sick from the flu shot. But you can get sick from the flu (caught via usual transports) within the first two weeks of receiving your flu shot. What you said is a common misconception. Unless of course you just had an allergic reaction to it, which would've taken about 15 minutes to set in.

      --
      Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
    2. Re:Last Post! by zenyu · · Score: 4, Informative

      You can't get sick from the flu shot.

      But you can feel sick due to a flu shot, or any other vacination for that matter. The whole point is to mobilize your immune system against whatever you are getting vacinated for. So if you get a temperature, the sniffles, etc. That is perfectly normal. You are not sick if this is the flu shot, this response is what you want, it means that your immune system is now primed and ready to deal with the real thing.

      There are vacinations that really can make you sick and even kill you, like the most common form of the Polio vaccine and the only current form of the Smallpox vaccine. These use less potent relatives of the more dangerous virus to innoculate. This is good in that the vaccine is actually contagious so you get the people you missed innuculated too, and bad in that you end up killing or debilitating a bunch of people who might have otherwise lived happy lives. The flu vaccine uses killed virus so unless something went horribly wrong you will not have a colony living within you. Polio and Smallpox are so deadly that it is/was considered a good risk to use the more potent live vaccine. This is why our service members are instructed not to spend too much time with their significant others for a few weeks after they get some of their shots. Why risk killing people when you don't have to?

    3. Re:Last Post! by stefanlasiewski · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I took my flu shot, last year, and got sick from it.

      By 'sick' did you mean 'sick with the flu'?

      You probably didn't get the flu from the flu shot.

      The flu shot only protects you from certain strains of the flu virus. You probably got one of the many strains of the flu that wasn't covered by the flu shot. This was pretty common last year.

      And then, all of a sudden the media ran around screaming "Crisis Crisis" when stocks of the flu shot got low (per the schedule).

      --
      "Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
    4. Re:Last Post! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      not true. you can get sick from the flu shot, just not the flu, ie allergic reactions. contrary to popular belief, no scientific journal has ever found the flu shot to be more effective at preventing the flu than a placebo, this is one dead virus you definately do not need floating around in you.

    5. Re:Last Post! by tommck · · Score: 1

      Yeah right...

      My friend's father found this out the hard way. He died from his flu shot. The flu shot was somehow read wrong by his brain so his immune system started to attack his spinal column. He deteriorated over the course of about 4 months and died.

      I haven't had a flu shot since I was a child. Haven't had the flu since I was a child either... Coincidence? I don't give a crap. I'm not risking making myself sick or dying just to avoid getting the flu.

      --
      ---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
  2. I wonder... by Jorkapp · · Score: 0

    If it takes 80 some years to discover what caused a flu pandemic, how long will it take to discover what caused the SARS outbreak?

    --
    Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
    1. Re:I wonder... by pphrdza · · Score: 2, Insightful
      probably much less than 80+ years, considering the (relatively) short time it took to discover the cause of AIDS.

  3. I thought it was caused more by social conditions by GonzoDave · · Score: 4, Interesting

    postwar, rather than any inherent lethality

  4. 85 years? by shfted! · · Score: 3, Funny

    85 years just to solve that? They really flu through it, didn't they!

    --
    He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
  5. Just the Receptor by stevesliva · · Score: 5, Informative

    I know nothing about microbiology, yet I know from NPR that only the structure of the receptor has been determined, not the entire gene sequence of the virus. Granted, I'm not sure if the receptor is what made it so virulent and deadly, but the rest of the virus is still unknown.

    --
    Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
    1. Re:Just the Receptor by DrDNA · · Score: 1

      I know nothing about microbiology, yet I know from NPR that only the structure of the receptor has been determined, not the entire gene sequence of the virus. Granted, I'm not sure if the receptor is what made it so virulent and deadly, but the rest of the virus is still unknown.

      The receptor isn't part of the virus. It is the part of the human/bird/pig that the virus binds to.

  6. MODERATION ABUSE!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Don't mod me down, mod Jorkapp down, it's his signature.

  7. Re:I thought it was caused more by social conditio by isn't+my+name · · Score: 5, Informative

    I thought it was caused more by social conditions postwar, rather than any inherent lethality

    Actually, no. It was a particularly deadly virus that actually hit the adult population harder than children, unlike most influenza strains. The fact that there were troops being transported all over and then returning home probably helped to speed its spread, but given what I've read about it, a modern city today would be hit pretty hard by the 1918 flu.

  8. All we need now... by kommakazi · · Score: 1

    ...is a time machine

  9. yeah... you're both probably right by Undefined+Parameter · · Score: 1

    In all likelihood, I just felt sick afterwards... and then later got a strain of flu that wasn't covered by the vaccine.

    My apologies for the error.

    ~UP

    --
    Eat the Path.
  10. I opened the window... by dnahelix · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...and INFLUENZA!

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    1. Re:I opened the window... by tommck · · Score: 1

      Who's Enza?

      --
      ---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
  11. What Sample? by waldoj · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I read Gina Kolata's Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic] a couple of years ago, so I'm quite interested to find out from where the sample was acquired. Kolata describes a couple of efforts to extract samples, one from the body of a woman buried in a lead-lined coffin, another from the body of a miner buried deep under once-frozen tundra near the Arctic Circle, in North America. Neither panned out.

    So, where'd they finally get the sample from?

    -Waldo Jaquith

    1. Re:What Sample? by Isbiten · · Score: 3, Informative

      From http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/

      Recently the virus has been reconstructed from the tissue of a dead soldier and is now being genetically characterized

      --
      I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
    2. Re:What Sample? by Randym · · Score: 5, Informative
      ...biopsies from soldiers who died from influenza in 1918 were preserved and maintained in the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Another sample was taken from an Inuit woman who had succumbed to the infection and had been buried in the Alaskan permafrost. Together, these samples yielded a number of pieces of RNA from the virus. A few years ago, Taubenberger and his colleagues at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology were able to piece together enough fragments to reconstruct the sequence of the gene that coded for the viral protein hemagglutinin. These are the oldest viral sequences that have been reconstructed to date. Then Basler and Palese at Mount Sinai Institute of Medicine in New York managed to construct an expression system that allowed them to make the hemagglutinin protein. Finally, Wilson and Stevens developed their own systems and made enough of the protein to crystallize and solve the structure using x-ray crystallography.

      Gee, Waldoj, perhaps you should RTA (the second link, to the Scripps Institute). In fact *some* of the RNA *did* come from an Arctic tundra burial. But the final protein analysis was somewhat more complex.

      PS: Thanks for mentioning this book. I'm jotting it down and am going to search it out.

      --
      DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
    3. Re:What Sample? by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

      I kinda of hope the US develops a vacine for this strain just in case someone decideds that it would make a good weapon. 12 Monkeys anyone?

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  12. aka: spanish flu, pandemic by bgins · · Score: 3, Informative

    The CDC has a couple good pages on pandemics, of which the spanish flu was the worst in the 20th century.

    1. Re:aka: spanish flu, pandemic by bgins · · Score: 2, Interesting
      http://www.hhs.gov/nvpo/pandemics/flu3.htm#9 :


      The Spanish Influenza pandemic is the catastrophe against which all modern pandemics are measured. It is estimated that approximately 20 to 40 percent of the worldwide population became ill and that over 20 million people died. Between September 1918 and April 1919, approximately 500,000 deaths from the flu occurred in the U.S. alone. Many people died from this very quickly. Some people who felt well in the morning became sick by noon, and were dead by nightfall. Those who did not succumb to the disease within the first few days often died of complications from the flu (such as pneumonia) caused by bacteria.


      One of the most unusual aspects of the Spanish flu was its ability to kill young adults. The reasons for this remain uncertain. With the Spanish flu, mortality rates were high among healthy adults as well as the usual high-risk groups. The attack rate and mortality was highest among adults 20 to 50 years old. The severity of that virus has not been seen again.


      The formula for a bad pandemic seems to be (1) contagiousness; (2) deadliness; (3) opportunity to spread, which implies a both an intrinsic property: (a) "laziness"/non-greediness or a delayed onset (HIV vs. Ebola), and (b) good mixing opportunities (see the link above for examples of why second waves sometimes occur, or how even seasonal timing with the schoolyear can aid in spreading).
    2. Re:aka: spanish flu, pandemic by weeboo0104 · · Score: 1

      If the flu of 1918 is known as Spanish flu, does that mean if it struck again today it would be know as Spanish fly?

      --
      It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
  13. Double Infection is the really terrifying possibil by Guy_Warwick · · Score: 2, Informative

    I just listened to a microbiologist on the radio who compared the 1918 strain to the present situation.

    He warned that a double carrier of bird flu and regular flu could incubate a mutation of a kind that no one has any immunities to.

    There is some info in this New Scientist article on double infection

    http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9 99 94578

    PS for gods sake someone explain to this Moron what the html command is to format the above hyperlink

  14. command you are looking for is: by Phil+John · · Score: 1

    text of link

    --
    I am NaN
    1. Re:command you are looking for is: by Guy_Warwick · · Score: 1

      Thanks - appreciated Guy

  15. MOD PARENT -1 STUPID by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    MOD PARENT -1 STUPID